International News Archives

THE RANKINGS: Oxford’s long reign

Oxford University has retained the number one spot in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for a ninth year in a row. But the reputation of the wider UK sector is rapidly eroding, with a similar trend seen in the US. Oxford’s reign is now the longest in the history of the league table, beating Harvard’s eight-year stint which ended in 2011. The institution’s performance has been bolstered by significant improvements in its income from industry and the number of patents that cite its research, as well as its teaching scores. Across the Atlantic, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is now the US’ highest-ranked university, in second place globally, its best-ever performance. It replaces Stanford, which has dropped from second to sixth, its lowest position since 2010, driven by declining scores for teaching, research environment and international outlook. Harvard University has moved from fourth to third place and Princeton from sixth to fourth. MIT and Princeton are proving to be dark horses, with the data revealing steady improvement in their positions over the past decade. But while the top of the ranking is still dominated by US and UK institutions, the data behind it reveals a more worrisome trend: both countries are seeing a rapid decline in their average research and teaching reputation. The UK’s teaching reputation has dropped by 3 percent since last year and research reputation by 5 percent, based on more than 93,000 responses to THE’s Academic Reputation Survey, in which academics choose up to 15 institutions they believe excel in teaching and, separately, research. Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, UK, believes the decline in teaching reputation is due to underfunding. “When you underfund university teaching, as we have been doing, the result is often worse staff-to-student ratios, problems with marking and evaluation and inadequate contact hours or class sizes. If you do this while other countries take the opposite route, your relative position is bound to deteriorate,” he says. The reputation of the US sector is also falling. In the past year alone, there has been a 4 percent drop in the country’s share of votes for teaching and a 3 percent drop for research. Meanwhile, universities based outside the US and UK have 51 percent of the vote share for teaching and 49 percent for research, up from 37 and 35 percent respectively a decade ago. The key countries gaining in esteem are China, France and Germany. Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford, says the trends mainly reflected “other systems coming up than the US and UK declining”. “One of the longer-term factors is the comparative rise in resources and capability of national systems in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia. On the whole, Europeanisation — including Bologna-style cooperation and the framework research programmes, such as the current Horizon — have strengthened universities in continental Europe,” he says. Meanwhile, China’s rise in reputation is “very much driven by increasing levels of government investment.” Prof. Marginson says…

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Election implications for education

(Dr. Larry Arnn is President, Hillsdale College, USA. [email protected])

I write this a few days before an important election in America. It has implications for education and for every area of American policy. Should government continue to become more centralised, more controlled by complex bureaucratic rules in the hundreds of thousands?

This has been the trend in […]

Australia: Mobile phones usage debate

Visa delays and refusals are playing havoc with Australian universities’ course and financial planning, weeks ahead of the new semester starting July/August. Median visa processing time frames for higher education students have more than tripled in the past few months, according to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). Fifty percent of applicants are kept waiting at least 47 days for their paperwork to be processed — up from 14 days in February — with 10 percent of students experiencing delays of at least four months. Meanwhile, refusal rates for offshore visa applicants are running at almost three times the pre-Covid average. Overall, one in five applications is rejected, including about one in three from India, one in two from Nepal and three in five from Pakistan. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) says its deadline for South Asian students to accept enrolment offers used to be about a month before the start of a semester. Visa processing delays have forced the institution to increase the buffer period, according to deputy vice-chancellor Iain Watts. “If they haven’t accepted their offers by about two months before the start of term, we won’t confirm their enrolments because we know they won’t get a visa in time,” says Watt. According to Watt, UTS could lose more than A$100 million (Rs.559 crore) in tuition fees from students who would have been able to enrol this year but for the visa processing changes and delays over the past six months. UTS is one of 16 universities that has managed to retain their Level 1 immigration risk rating despite a widespread increase in visa rejections. “You can imagine what it’s like for institutions that are rated at Level 2 or 3, and have been put at the back of the visa processing queue,” says Watt. DHA figures show that demand for Australian education remains strong. Some 185,000 would-be students applied from overseas for higher education visas over the 11 months to May — slightly more than over the same period a year earlier, and more than 50 percent more than in pre-Covid times. But the number of visas issued so far this calendar year is 26 percent lower than in the equivalent period of 2023. Watt says all but five Oz varsities are losing students to other countries, principally the US but also non-anglophone destinations such as Germany and Malaysia, “because we’re perceived as not as welcoming as we used to be”. He doesn’t expect visa processing to improve before the next federal election. “All of this is about political parties wanting to show that they’re in control of migration numbers.”

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Canada: Plunging popularity

Canada seems to be losing the attention of international students so quickly that its institutions might not recruit enough students this year to hit the sharply lower visa caps imposed recently by the Trudeau administration. After watching overseas student enrolments surge to more than 400,000, the federal government this year announced the imposition of study visa caps aimed at ratcheting down the number by about a third to around 290,000. But at current application rates, Canada’s colleges and universities might get only some 230,000 students from abroad for the coming academic year, estimates ApplyBoard, an online services company. Universities Canada says its members are “seeing application numbers down” by an average of 40 percent. “Canada’s attractiveness has fallen significantly,” Meti Basiri, ApplyBoard’s chief executive and co-founder, told Times Higher Education. “There is far less demand than supply.” The reason, explains Basiri, is that the Trudeau administration has taken several other steps in recent months beyond the visa caps, and had threatened more, which together are discouraging many international students from considering Canada. Those additional steps by the federal government include doubling of the wealth requirement for incoming international students, new limits on their working hours and new visa limits on their spouses. While the full enrolment picture for the coming academic year is not yet known, the apparent speed of the turnaround is shocking. In recent months, Canada’s higher education leaders had been loudly warning of dire consequences from visa caps, apparently unaware that those caps might prove moot because of other factors. “We did what the UK did,” says Basiri of the limits on visa rights for spouses and dependents of students, “and five other things on top.” Also read: Canada: International students can only work for 24 hours per week

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Indonesia: Slow flight from Jakarta

As Jakarta (pop.10.6 million) rapidly sinks into the ocean — 40 percent of the greater metropolitan area of the country’s admin capital (pop.30 million) is now below sea level — Indonesia’s behind-schedule, controversy-ridden new capital city on the jungle-clad island of Borneo could spell a new era for the archipelago’s universities. The ambition for the new capital Nusantara is bold: a futuristic, sustainable smart city that can propel Indonesia’s economy, supported by a “21st-century education cluster”, including world-class universities. Two years in, the reality is a little different: a development project that is lacking in investment and — somewhat ironically, given the situation in Jakarta — a stable water supply. In June, amid concerns about the progress of the new capital, outgoing president Joko Widodo broke ground on the construction of a new branch of Gunadarma University, the first higher education institution in Nusantara. But analysts are doubtful that top universities, both within Indonesia and internationally, will be rushing to set up in the new capital. Not only does the new city still lack basic infrastructure, there is unlikely to be a mass exodus from Jakarta. “Perhaps the government might offer very high incentives for these universities to build in the capital city, but at the end of the day in terms of population, in terms of the demand, (it) is still located in Jakarta,” says Teguh Yudo Wicaksono, head of the Mandiri Institute, an economic thinktank. Indonesia has been attempting to attract international universities more widely in recent years, inviting top institutions to establish branch campuses and develop new research centres. In 2022, Australia’s Monash University opened a branch on the outskirts of the current capital — crucially, on the opposite side of the city to the sinking north Jakarta — while Deakin and Lancaster universities are set to open a joint campus in Bandung, 94 miles from Jakarta.

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Asia: Private varsities boom

The route to Sunway University is far from your typical campus approach. To reach this Malaysian institution, you must first navigate to Sunway City on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, past various Sunway hotels and Sunway shopping malls, away from the Sunway medical centre, until you reach the entrance to a canopied walk. Sunway U is a prized feather in the cap of the south-east Asian conglomerate that established it in 2004. Universities such as Sunway have been popping up across Asia for decades. South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) was established in the 1980s by a steel company, while Malaysia is also home to Universiti Teknologi Petronas, set up in the late 1990s by the Petronas oil and gas corporation. And newer ones are emerging — Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup broke ground on VinUni in 2018, the same year that India’s Jio University was established by the parent company of the country’s most popular telecom company. For big businesses, setting up a university seems an unusual move as it is unlikely to generate the profits they are used to. But there are other driving factors. In some cases, company leaders feel they need to step in if they want to secure the graduates they need for their expanding workforces, while others are prodded by governments or are simply philanthropically minded and keen to support the development of their nation. Often, it is a mix of all these reasons. Whatever the motivation, many of the institutions are having an impact. “The famous ones… are really among the best universities,” says Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. “These are some of the most innovative institutions in their respective countries.” Not a few scholars also believe that universities with their roots in industry are well-placed to develop employable students — some of whom go on to work for their alma mater’s parent company. At Sunway University, for example, students have opportunities to intern with the conglomerate, as well as with other organisations. However, while the best ones may be driving innovation in higher education, there is also a “sleazy” underworld of companies setting up low-quality institutions for non-altruistic purposes, according to Altbach. For example, there are cases of property developers in Indonesia and the Philippines attempting to attract homebuyers with the promise of new universities that, in reality, are unlikely to offer much by way of quality education. And even among the best of these universities, their demographic reach can be limited. “Despite their deep pockets, they’re, generally speaking, tuition dependent,” says Prof. Altbach. This means they tend to attract those who can afford to pay higher fees — middle-and upper-class students — which does little for improving access to higher education. Depending on how they are set up, corporate-owned universities also risk falling prey to market fluctuations and shareholder whims. Sunway University, for example, only narrowly avoided being caught up in the 2007 financial crisis because the group’s founder, fearing bankruptcy, had moved…

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Finland: Free Finnish education

Ideally, Marianne Korkalainen’s high school in Rautavaara, a tiny town in eastern Finland, would enrol at least 20 new pupils each year. This autumn, her shrinking municipality will send her only about 12. But Ms Korkalainen, the head teacher, has a plan: she intends to invite half a dozen youngsters from poorer countries to help fill her empty seats. Eager adolescents from places such as Myanmar, Vietnam and Tanzania will swap their tropical cities for her snowy bolthole. They will receive a Finnish education. At Finnish taxpayers’ expense. School-age populations are shrinking in lots of European countries — and in Finland, faster than most. By 2030, the country could have nearly 10 percent fewer children aged 4-18, according to EU projections. By 2040, their ranks might be smaller by 20 percent. This spells trouble in particular for rural schools, which suffer from having few births and from migration to the cities. Hundreds have shut their doors in recent decades. Some now offer local youngsters incentives, such as free driving lessons and small cash “scholarships”, in the hope of retaining them. The idea of giving vacant desks to foreigners is new, and has been propelled by a Finnish startup. Finest Future sells online Finnish lessons to eager beavers in Asian, African and Latin American countries. Those who achieve decent proficiency are referred to willing schools. By the end of this year, the firm will have helped import around 1,500 foreign pupils. But it says its goal is ultimately to supply Finland’s upper secondary schools — which educate about 110,000 students in total — with around 15,000 new students each year. Already some small schools are taking in more foreign pupils than Finnish ones. In the long run all Finns benefit, argues Peter Vesterbacka, Finest Future’s co-founder, an entrepreneur who helped build the ‘Angry Birds’ brand for Rovio, a games company. Finland’s total population of 5.5 million will start declining within the next decade. The country struggles to attract high-skilled foreign workers (about 9 percent of its inhabitants were born abroad, one of the lowest rates in Europe). Vesterbacka reckons that foreigners who turn up when they are teenagers, who learn the language, and who are educated in the Finnish system are far more likely to stay, and succeed, than adults who are targeted later through skilled-worker programmes. He reckons they bring much more money into the country than the government must spend on their instruction. Also read: Finland: 12-Year-Old opens fire at school, killing one

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Asean: Few humanities takers

With cannons on campus, its own Qing-dynasty wall and the first Dutch fort in Taiwan nearby, National Cheng Kung University seems an appealing place for a budding historian. However, after a first round of applications, no students had accepted places in the history department for next year. It is a shock for the university, ranked third in Taiwan. In much of East Asia, universities face a demographic crisis. In Japan the population of 18-year-olds has been declining since the 1990s. In Taiwan, the undergraduate population has dipped by more than a quarter in the past decade. Experts in South Korea talk of an “enrolment cliff”, as 3.6 million students in 2010 fell to 3 million last year. This has hit humanities and social-sciences departments hard. Faced with a more uncertain economic environment than their parents, students want to study subjects that will lead to well-paid jobs. These are mostly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Private universities, which educate most students in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, often depend on tuition fees, and therefore most need to adapt to students’ wishes to stay afloat. In South Korea, 18 private universities have closed for good since 2000. What’s to be done? Universities have managed to increase foreign student numbers, but not enough to offset demographic decline. But efforts to increase the rate of university-going among locals could still bear fruit. In Japan, the growth in female students has meant that the university population increased slightly over a decade. In Singapore, the number of students continues to rise, even as the traditional university-age population is falling, through policies which encourage older student cohorts to enroll. Singapore’s government, while fond of STEM subjects, also stresses the importance of social sciences and the humanities for policymaking. The number of students in these faculties is growing. Also read: Asean: Few humanities takers

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Mexico: Woman president hope

A climate scientist has become the first female leader of Mexico after winning a record-breaking majority on the back of promises to transform the country into a “scientific and innovation power”. But questions remain over how far she will break from the populist policies of her predecessor. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, a former professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), will assume office on October 1, replacing her mentor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose six years in power saw numerous attacks on academics. The strong mandate for the member of Lopez Obrador’s left-wing Morena party could give her the legitimacy to establish her own policies away from the influence of the outgoing president, says Cath Andrews, a history professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (Cide) in Mexico City. Lopez Obrador oversaw a series of cuts to institutions’ budgets — particularly those he perceived as opposing his regime — and passed a science law that sought to shape research spending around his government’s priorities. “Until now, she (Dr. Sheinbaum) has been extremely careful not to antagonise Lopez Obrador, nor suggest she will be anything but the continuation of his project,” says Dr. Andrews, adding that this “makes it very difficult to accurately predict what she is going to do on all fronts, higher education included”. Pardo’s background as an academic (she is also the daughter of academics) has, however, raised hopes that she might be more sympathetic. Not everyone is convinced. Alma Maldonado, a researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, says she has seen little sign that Dr. Sheinbaum might treat universities differently, pointing out that she is known as “the copy” and has embraced all of President Lopez Obrador’s reforms, including recent proposed changes to the judiciary. But Dr. Sheinbaum’s education adviser, Rosaura Ruiz, an Unam professor, recently signalled a potential departure from the past when she said in an interview that “nothing has been decided” on Mexico’s controversial science law passed in tumultuous fashion in 2023, and since the subject of a legal challenge. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist) Also read: Mexico: Textbooks rewriting anger

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Decentralisation wave

(Dr. Larry Arnn is President, Hillsdale College, USA. [email protected]) As in India and much of the world, politics has been turbulent in America for years. Perhaps it is worse here. President Trump has been impeached twice by our House of Representatives, but both times acquitted by the Senate. After all that, he is still front runner for the presidency in an election scheduled for November. President Biden, showing signs of age for years, performed poorly in a face-off debate with President Trump on June 27. Now he has withdrawn from the race and the Democratic Party must choose a new candidate at its August 19-22 convention, probably incumbent vice president Kamala Harris. That candidate will have just ten weeks to campaign before the election on November 5. It is a mess. This election is consequential for every area of policy, including education. I prefer the Republican platform, which supports the wave of decentralisation sweeping across the US. ‘School choice’ is the term we use for it. It takes several forms, the biggest being charter schools, about which I have written in a previous column. Charter schools are exempt from many of the bureaucratic controls that plague our system. In contemporary America, more than half the employees in public schools are not teachers. Legions are employed to formulate complex rules about what and how to teach. Little wonder that American students score poorly in reading and math assessment skills. Students of charter schools do better. Since 2019, public school enrollment in America has fallen 3 percent. On the other hand, charter schools enrolments have risen by 7 percent over the same period. Homeschooling has also become popular across the nation. People are fleeing a system that doesn’t perform. This trend is important. Schools thrive when authority is located in the school. Learning happens in the soul of each student. Teachers and parents who know the student are the best people to enable and empower. They may not possess the expertise of high-brow intellectuals, but education doesn’t become rocket science until later years. Up to that point, common sense, native intelligence, love, and hard work are sufficient to guide the learning of the young. Just as every puppy is born to bark and wag its tail, every human child is born to learn. Parents are seldom experts in caring for babies. Somehow they have always managed. In America, government has become larger, relative to everything else, and steadily more centralised for three generations. As this has happened, money has moved farther away from the people who earn and provide it and from their needs. In America, school choice is reversing this trend in education. In India, a very large percentage of students attend private schools. I think this is a healthy development. Also read: LETTER FROM AMERICA: In praise of charter schools

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Dog & student trials

(Dr. Larry Arnn is President, Hillsdale College, USA. [email protected]) Do you ever watch dog trials? I find them fascinating. Dogs herd sheep, run over obstacles, catch frisbees, and seek by scent and sight. They exhaust themselves in these contests. They do it joyfully. It is a fulfillment of their nature. Students too face numerous trials. The most intense are examinations that come at the end of each year and, the worst (or best), just before graduation. In America and India, these are high stakes trials. They can have lasting impact on lives and careers. Working in a college, I often witness students confronting these trials. They prompt me to think of the dog trials I like to watch. Yet students don’t seem to be having as much fun as dogs. I believe the difference is in the nature of the two species. Dogs have a nature, as do all beings. Running and jumping, seeking and fetching fulfills that nature. They love to do it. Humans have a nature too: it is to learn and gather knowledge. We can find our highest joy in them. Of course, we do not have to learn and grow. We are free to choose among many interests and pursuits, and we can give them the wrong priority. Relaxation instead of work; watching TV instead of reading; playing video games instead of solving equations. There is nothing wrong with any of these choices, but TV and video games will ruin you if you give them highest priority. Coming back to summative examinations, these human dog trials are usually not enjoyable even if they are necessary. Let me suggest two ways to make them more enjoyable and successful. The first is to reduce focus on the immediate outcome, the score you will get. I’m aware that exam scores are important, but they don’t guarantee success. Focus instead on the work of learning. If you do it with discipline, you will inevitably get high scores. Get plenty of rest. Eliminate distractions. Focus. Give your best hours to the most important tasks. Pursue them intensely. These practices are ways to master yourself in every activity. They will make you a person of moral virtue. That is half of happiness. The second recommendation is to focus about the ultimate outcome which is not to pass a test, but to learn. History, literature, physics, mathematics and chemistry are wonderful, valuable to everyone. Your goal should be to make your knowledge of them last. Master key concepts and the knowledge they contain. This will make you a learned person, a person of intellectual virtue. That is the other half of happiness. Trials are more important to humans than to dogs. For us they are occasions to grow morally and intellectually. You can become a knowledgeable and happy person if you learn to accept challenges as opportunities to grow. And you might be admitted to IIT — or Hillsdale. Also read: LETTER FROM AMERICA: In praise of charter schools

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United States: Mobile phones usage debate

“It’s like they don’t trust us,” says Eva King, a 14-year-old pupil at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, DC. Deal’s administration has banned mobile phones during the entire school day. Pupils must store their devices inside Yondr pouches — grey padded cases that supposedly can be opened only with a special tool. Adults unlock the pouches with special magnets as pupils leave for the day. Unsurprisingly, pupils have hacked the system. (“What do you expect?” Eva says. “We’re middle-schoolers.”) The girls recite a list of workarounds. Those magnets have become hot commodities, and a few have gone missing. Pupils have been seen banging pouches open in toilets. Debates about teenagers’ access to phones and their use in schools have heated up lately. Some state legislatures in America are passing laws to stop phones from being used in classrooms, without banning them from schools altogether. A popular book published in March, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, has drawn fresh attention to evidence that social media, mostly accessed through smartphones, may be to blame for a sharp rise in anxiety, depression and self-harm among young people today. Some researchers are unconvinced that phones are causing mental illness. Although America and Britain have reported a rise in problems as social-media use has surged, not all rich countries have had similarly correlated increases. “Adolescence is influenced by multiple things (sic),” says Margarita Panayiotou, a researcher at the University of Manchester. “It would be unrealistic to expect that one thing — social media — is driving adolescent mental health.” Most parents want their children to have phones available at school. In February, the National Parents’ Union, an advocacy group, polled 1,506 public-school parents and found that a majority think that pupils should be allowed to use phones during free time. Larry McEwen, a parent at Deal and the school’s basketball coach, agrees. He believes pupils should have phones for emergencies. He and Eva King cited a lockdown last year at a nearby school because of a gun scare. That was when having phones came in handy. Yet the devices are plainly disruptive. Pupils can receive more than 50 notifications during a school day, according to a study of 203 children by Common Sense Media, a non-profit group based in San Francisco. Teachers complain that pupils watch YouTube and use other apps in class. Phones can be instruments of bullying, and pupils have been secretly videographed while using toilets or undressing in locker rooms. These days, the notorious schoolyard fight can be organised by phone. It is also clear that mobile phones can undermine learning. Several studies have found that their use decreases concentration in school, and the phones don’t only affect the user. “There’s a second-hand-smoke effect,” says Sabine Polak, a founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, another advocacy group. New state laws seek to enforce phone-free classrooms while keeping pupils and parents connected. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law last year that bans the use of mobile phones by pupils in…

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Palestine/Gaza: Struggle against educide

Two hundred days into the invasion of Gaza by Israel, not a single university is left standing. At least 95 university professors and 5,000 students are reported to have been killed, while more than 500,000 children have been out of school for over seven months. “Everything was beautiful before October 7,” laments Besan Emad, an English translation student at Gaza University trapped in Rafah, the southern city that, at the time of writing (May 22), was one of the last parts of the Gaza Strip outside the control of the Israeli military. “We could find everything easily. We had AI we could use. But today we have no internet, no resources and no university.” In the short term, the focus for Palestinian civilians fleeing Israeli attacks is survival. “The situation in Rafah is very bad… Israeli occupation has destroyed everything — hospital, schools, universities,” says Emad. Yet, even in the face of a strategy branded “educide” — an attempt to extinguish breeding grounds for intellectual thought and liberty of expression within Palestine, as part of the retaliation against Hamas’ October 7 attacks — efforts to preserve higher education in Gaza and the West Bank might offer an unlikely symbol of hope. Ms Emad is one of a growing number of Palestinian students attempting to continue their studies in the harshest of conditions through online learning, accessing tutoring offered by global scholars when she is able to get online. Marah Shaqalaih is another Palestinian student accessing online courses, with hers offered by universities in the West Bank. The daughter of a former engineering lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza, her own institution, Al-Azhar University of Gaza, was destroyed by the Israeli military. “We started (the academic year) and only two weeks in, the war began. I was with my patients and (was) talking to them, and now I do not know what happened to them,” she says. The Israeli army claims that it found Hamas explosives and rocket parts at Al-Azhar, as well as part of a tunnel network. But the university, which was one of the biggest universities in the Gaza Strip with about 15,000 undergraduates, has no affiliation to Hamas, Ms Shaqalaih insists. Most university professors in Gaza haven’t received their salary since November, with many institutions telling their staff to seek other jobs. Fabio Carbone, a senior lecturer in tourism management at the University of Northampton, who has been working to recruit academic tutors for university students from Gaza, says no international organisation would give money to universities in the strip because of their perceived ties to Hamas, “and the politics have nothing to do with academia any more… the victims in this are the students”, he says. Beyond the destruction in Gaza, the situation in the West Bank has also worsened drastically since October 7. The number of checkpoints and searches by Israeli soldiers has increased significantly, and all the universities switched initially to online teaching in a bid to protect students. Samia Al-Botmeh, an assistant…

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Finland: Contradictory policies

Education leaders have described Finnish government plans to charge full-cost tuition fees to students from outside the European Union as “paradoxical”, as the country hopes to significantly increase its international student intake. At present, Helsinki subsidises the higher education of students from outside the EU or the European Economic Area (EEA), although some universities already charge full-cost fees. In early June, the Ministry of Education and Culture set out proposed amendments to Finland’s Universities Act and its Universities of Applied Science Act, which would result in students from non-EU and non-EEA countries required to pay the full cost of their tuition if it is taught in a language other than Finnish or Swedish. “Charging fees for tuition at full cost aims to improve the finances of higher education institutions and to encourage foreigners studying in Finland to remain in the country,” Sari Multala, the minister of science and culture, said in a statement. Students from outside the EU or the EEA would also be required to pay application fees, a move the ministry says is aimed at reducing “injudicious and low-quality applications”. When news of the government plans first circulated last year, a coalition of academic and professional unions described them “a disaster” in terms of Finland’s long-term plans to make higher education in the country more international. Previously, the Finnish government established a goal of attracting 15,000 international students by 2030, in an effort to reduce workplace shortages and rebalance an ageing population. “Because Finland needs foreigners, it’s a bit paradoxical to make it less attractive for them to come,” Kai Nordlund, vice-rector at the University of Helsinki, told Times Higher Education. “Many of those who came here because of low tuition fees have stayed in the country and are contributing to national development.” The impact of the amendments differs among universities depending on their current practices. “Some universities provide a very high fraction of scholarships, which means that their income from tuition fees has been very low. Others, like our university, have collected fairly high tuition fees and given fewer scholarships,” he explains. “For these universities, the difference made by the new law will be small, because they’ve more or less been at this level of recovering the cost of the education already,” says Nordlund. Harri Halva, senior marketing specialist for the Finnish National Agency for Education’s ‘Study in Finland’ scheme, shares a similar perspective. “Moving to full tuition fees, we might experience a drop in certain areas. But overall we expect to continue on the steadily increasing trend line of international higher education students,” he says. “Having said that, we have to put more effort into our value proposal and convince our target audience that Finland as a well-functioning Nordic society is worth the investment,” he adds.

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China: Affirmative action resentment

On June 7, millions of young people wrote the world’s largest academic test. China’s university-entrance exam, known as the gaokao, is punishingly difficult. Students spend endless hours cramming for it. But it is also widely accepted as meritocratic. Work hard, score well and, no matter what your social background, you will get into a good college. Yet the test is administered in ways that don’t seem so meritocratic. Local governments are allowed to produce their own versions of gaokao, with different questions and scoring methods. Students in elite cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, enjoy an easier route into local universities, which include some of the country’s finest. The maximum possible score on the gaokao can change from year to year and may vary according to province, but it is usually 750. Most provinces award extra points (ranging from 5-20) to certain groups, such as military veterans and Chinese who return from overseas. Until recently, some provinces showered points on students who exhibited “ideological and political correctness” or had “significant social influence”. But such arbitrary criteria led to corruption and calls by the Central government to phase them out. Unsurprisingly, the extra-points system has bred resentment among those who receive no help with their scores. Lately their ire has been directed at members of minority groups, who have long been awarded grace marks simply on the basis of their ethnicity. The policy, begun long ago, aims to assimilate minorities into the dominant Han culture. But some Han, who make up over 90 percent of the mainland’s population, wonder why communities that nationalists often paint as disloyal and ungrateful, should receive such an advantage. The state itself has backed away from the policy in recent years. In 2014, the Central government indicated a desire for it to be re-evaluated. Since then, a number of provinces — such as Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong and Shanxi — have stopped giving extra points to minority students. Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has promoted the idea of a single Chinese identity, an effort that has involved trampling on the freedoms of minority groups and abolishing affirmative-action policies. But the authorities justify the latest moves as a way to improve “exam equality” and prevent cheating in the admissions process. Officials also claim that the schools in regions with big minority populations have improved so much that the bonuses are no longer needed to even things out. This is questionable. Students from minority groups still lag behind their Han peers. And if the government were so concerned about fairness, it would do away with other extra-point schemes, such as one targeting Taiwanese students in the attempt to lure them to mainland universities. But none of this is likely to make young Han cramming for the gaokao feel any less anxious.

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: In praise of charter schools

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA America is beset with bureaucracy. Several million people work in public education and most of them aren’t teachers. The effect of charter laws is to decentralise the management of schools, a major advantage In my last Letter from America (March), I wrote that Hillsdale College is sponsoring over 100 “charter schools” with more in the pipeline. Let me explain charter schools. “Charter” in this usage is a synonym for contract. Most state governments in America have passed laws permitting private citizens to manage schools under a special charter or contract. This permits these schools to receive public funds but run their own affairs with greater latitude. The terms vary by the state and even by city or town. In many states, they are liberal enough to permit the school to operate differently from regular “public schools”, our name for what in India are known as “government schools”. Usually, this money is paid per student enrolled in the charter school, and is usually lesser than the amount regular public schools receive. In most states, it is enough to educate children often with some help from parents and others. Meanwhile the government schools are left with more funding per pupil, for the pupils that remain. In theory and sometimes in practice, this eases their displeasure. The effect of charter laws is to decentralise the management of schools, a major advantage. America is beset with bureaucracy. Several million people work in public education, and most of them aren’t teachers. Look at the ratio of teachers to non-teachers in any private school in India, and I expect you will find that teachers constitute most of the staff. Not in regular government schools in America. One wonders what these other employees do. Of course, many of them maintain financial records, which is necessary. Many of them also write rules for the operation of classrooms. These rules are written by people who don’t spend time in classrooms. Therefore, the rules and regulations become innumerable and complex. Often, they serve goals other than the direct goal of learning. I believe the people of India have some experience with bureaucracy, and if I am right, they will know what I am talking about. The growth of bureaucracy in America is a relatively recent phenomenon. It has grown to advanced size in every department of government. It is particularly dysfunctional in the world of education, in my opinion, because of the nature of education and the nature of people. What are those natures? Human beings understand and communicate in a different way than other earthly creatures. All children learn to talk, just by watching and hearing and without elaborate instruction. The animals who live in our households, seeing and hearing the same things, don’t learn, at least nothing like so well. We are built to do this, and Western classic philosophers argue this is central to our nature. The ability to use a word, a sound, to signify not only a thing…

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Bitter-sweet Commencement

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA – [email protected] In America as in India, the academic year has ended for most colleges/universities, and students have dispersed for the summer. Those who just graduated will be coming back to visit, but never again to live and study on campus. For them, this is a time of joy and melancholy. They have completed their first great adventure away from home. What will the next one be? In India, I understand the final ceremony that concludes the college year is known as the Convocation. We use this term for any formal gathering of the entire college. For the last convocation, we have a special name: Commencement. Why Commencement, when the ceremony marks not a beginning but end of higher education for students? College is the final and highest preparation in people’s lives. The central elements of that preparation don’t depend on the specific work they will do. They will have many jobs, but their happiness will depend upon issues beyond work. Work itself will contribute to that happiness only if they do it “well,” i.e, not only efficiently and to their economic gain, but also honestly and as service to those who pay them and work with them. As they have been sons and daughters, now they are likely to become husbands and wives, and parents. They will be citizens of a country, and they will owe it loyalty if it is just, and effort to improve it if not. For graduates, this is a delightful and intense time promising growth in strength, intellect, and character. But it is also a sad occasion because in college, students form profound friendships as they live and learn together. The very word ‘college’ means partnership, and humans learn best together. We study and think together and surmount challenges together. Through this, we form bonds with fellow students that last a lifetime. In class, you are among people who will come to your wedding (perhaps to marry you!) and finally your funeral. There is nothing else quite like this experience. Nor are students at Commencement alone in their joy and melancholy. The faculty is present, as are parents and friends. All come to pay respect to graduates, who with faculty are dressed in robes, academic uniforms, varying by rank. These are the badges of honour. I have presided over 25 Commencements at Hillsdale College. When I look upon the scene, thousands gathered, I see the bonds that have brought them together. The graduates represent an achievement of all and of generations before because colleges are not built in a day. If you are nearing the time to enter college, think of the end of it, of Commencement. Prepare yourself to be happy on that day and the days that follow. If you know a student who has just commenced or is about to, honour and wish her well.

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United States: Police invitation danger

The perceived fairness of punishments handed to student protest leaders will be crucial for whether US universities can heal after police were invited to break up pro-Palestine sit-ins, according to a former college president. Many staff and students have condemned leaders’ decisions to invite police to campus, notably at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In a Substack post, Columbia history professor Adam Tooze warned that many would “struggle to unsee and unfeel” the “violence (that) came from the police side…at the invitation and request of the university administration”. Nicholas Dirks, former chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was previously a dean at Columbia, says management had been in a no-win situation because “they are either too lenient, for those who complain about, say, anti-semitism, or they are far too draconian, in not defending both academic freedom and freedom of speech”. However, calling the police “raises the volume” of such complaints, he says. “Such calls invariably lead to arrests that go beyond university codes of conduct and modes of adjudicating violations of them and frequently involve violent altercations,” says Prof. Dirks. “These interactions are now all recorded and circulated on video clips, so they become discursive tools to disseminate arguments about police violence, and, by implication, further evidence of the ill intent of administrators.” “The healing process will include whether students regard the punishments as fair and, ultimately, whether decisions about students are made with that fact top of mind — namely that these young people are our students and we have a larger responsibility for their welfare, which includes protection around protest,” adds Dirks. David Smith, associate professor at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, says some universities have shown how protests could be dispersed peacefully. For instance, the governing body of Brown University showed a way through the conflict by committing to a vote on divestment from Israel if students disbanded their camp. “There’s a long historical experience with protest that when you violently suppress it, you don’t make it go away — if anything, you encourage it,” he says. Also read: US students protest Biden’s stance on Gaza conflict

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Canada: Civil discourse professor

“You can point to brawling in the streets of Paris in the 13th century over rivalling theology professors, you can point to town-and-gown brawls in England in the 16th century, never mind the 1968 generation’s anti-war protests…” To Randy Boyagoda, the University of Toronto’s new adviser on civil discourse, campuses have always contained the right ingredients for “controversy and convulsions” throughout the history of higher education — namely lots of young people being brought together at a transformative point of their lives and being asked to “think out loud about difficult things”. So why has it taken until now for positions such as his —the first in Canada and one of a handful globally — to arise? The short answer is Gaza. The author and English professor — whose new role will see him develop a plan for events, resources and initiatives designed to promote respectful dialogue — told Times Higher Education that it would be absurd to pretend his appointment is not related to the war and the “deep and corrosive” divisions it has stirred up. What makes this situation different from the “convulsions” of the past for Prof. Boyagoda, is the “intensification of our connectivity” — young people on campuses receiving real-time information from Israel and Palestine, often about their own families. “That sense of connectivity has intensified the always present possibility of protest and controversy that I think to some degree is inherent in university life,” says Boyagoda. Toronto, like many campuses, has had its share of free speech controversies. A campus imam, Omar Patel, was dismissed by the institution in January over a social media post linked to the Gaza conflict, which he claims was falsely attributed to him. Meanwhile, students have called for action to be taken against a psychology professor, Stuart Kamenetsky, over historic social media posts that some regard as Islamophobic. Over all this looms Toronto’s long-standing employment of clinical psychologist, author and now right-wing “provocateur extraordinaire” Jordan Peterson, who resigned from the institution in 2022 but retains emeritus status. Prof. Boyagoda, vice-dean for undergraduates in Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science, acknowledges that the furore around Prof. Peterson was a “contributing factor” to the university’s spiky campus climate. “I see myself not as an authority figure doing this but as someone contributing, making conversations possible that otherwise might not have been possible had I not been in the room,” he says. According to Boyagoda, faculty and student bodies are increasingly looking to their institutions and leaders to issue position statements on global crises — as they largely did over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but then are hesitant to do so over the Israel-Hamas war. Prof. Boyagoda says that “statement culture” is a significant reason why the Palestine crisis has been so “incendiary” on campuses and argues that institutions should instead remain neutral on such matters. “I was struck by the immediacy and by the uniformity of the response in the support for Ukraine…it created an institutional precedent for universities demonstrating their public…

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United Kingdom: Postgrad work visa debate

UK universities are staging a last-ditch battle to resist further changes in the rules governing international students, and stave off more financial damage to the sector, ahead of the release of a keenly anticipated report into the graduate visa route. With the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) set to conclude its investigation into “abuses” in post-study rights of overseas students by May 14, critics have been pushing the government to take ever more drastic measures to bring down the number of international students, arguing for an overall cap, and for some institutions to be prevented from sponsoring visas at all. The sector has been warned to “brace for the worst” as a fraught political climate on immigration — exacerbated by poor local election results for the Conservative Party — has put pressure on Downing Street to take further action on the two-year graduate route, after removing the right for Masters students to bring dependants, which was blamed for a 44 percent drop in January enrolments. Options understood to be on the table include scrapping the visa entirely, reducing its duration to six months or a year, or placing extra conditions on its use, such as a salary threshold. In an 11th-hour attempt to protect the visa, sector leaders have attempted to highlight the potential economic damage cuts would do to the whole economy, not just universities. Michael Spence, the president of UCL, says the government’s own analysis has shown the visa is “set to bring in £12.9 billion of additional tax revenue compared to £6.8 billion of extra fiscal costs between 2021-22 and 2030-31”. “If we want to grow the economy and encourage global leadership and innovation, we need to continue to attract the brightest and best,” Dr. Spence told Times Higher Education, adding that it would be an “act of extraordinary national self-harm to curb the graduate route”. Also read: United Kingdom: Age retirement suit

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South Korea: Capacity expansion impasse

On the face of it, the plan by South Korea’s president Yoon Suk-yeol to increase the number of doctors being trained at the country’s medical schools sounded like a winning way to get the public onside ahead of a parliamentary election. In reality, by joining the long line of politicians who have tried to change the status quo surrounding medical admissions, Yoon further turned the public against him, contributing to the resounding defeat his party, the People Power Party, suffered in the recent election (April) to retain control of parliament. In South Korea, it seems, attempts to reform medical education are doomed to fail. The government’s plan to increase capacity by 2,000, announced in February, resulted in 12,000 junior doctors walking out for over six weeks, senior doctors threatening to resign en masse and a burgeoning medical crisis as the public suddenly found themselves unable to access healthcare. The president’s plan backfired. “Ordinary people, who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in policy matters, simply experienced first-hand consequences of the strike,” says Byunghwan Son, director of Asia-Pacific and north-east Asian studies at George Mason University. “Surgeries got cancelled. Treatments were delayed.” With one of the lowest doctor-patient ratios among developed countries, a rapidly ageing population requiring greater medical attention and only 3,058 students admitted into the country’s medical schools each year, reforms are sorely needed in South Korea and are generally supported by the public. The medical profession is also popular, with admission applications far outnumbering available seats. But attempts to reform medical school quotas have caused headaches for a succession of Korean leaders, with doctors vehemently opposed to any increase. They argue that the government needs to improve their working conditions and pay before increasing numbers. Critics say doctors are trying to avoid competition within the profession. Either way, the Korean Medical Association — the organisation behind the strikes — is a powerful force. “The size of medical schools has been kept small mainly because politically influential doctors have been staunch opponents of any capacity increase,” says Dr. Son. “They wouldn’t hesitate to make a political scene, such as staging protests and strikes, to make their voices heard. And that’s been proven effective.” Now, in the wake of a resounding defeat for his party, Yoon looks set to become a lame duck president, unable to advance significant reforms in the final three years of his five-year term. That is likely to include the medical school reforms, leaving the sector untouchable. “A likely path going forward would be for the embattled government to give in and the situation returning to the status quo,” says Dr. Son. Also read: South Korea: Doctors rally against government’s medical school recruitment plan

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Greece: Private varsities green light

Legislation enabling private universities to operate in Greece will deliver “significantly positive results” and limit the flow of Greek students to overseas institutions, says the country’s education minister. Kyriakos Pierrakakis told Times Higher Education that the education law, which was passed in March amid mass student protests, would facilitate the “opening up of the Greek university system”. The legislation allows private institutions that meet certain criteria to issue degrees equivalent to those of public universities. International institutions, meanwhile, will be able to open branches in Greece, charging tuition fees while maintaining non-profit status. Private universities have long been a contentious subject in Greece. Article 16 of the country’s Constitution holds that “art and science, research and teaching shall be free”, while “the establishment of university-level institutions by private persons is prohibited”. When the recent law was first tabled in parliament, opposition MPs across five parties submitted objections regarding its constitutionality. Opposition party Syriza further argues that the bill could create a two-tier system favouring the wealthy, with lawmaker Harris Mamoulakis commenting: “Whoever has money will study: the power of privilege.” An estimated 18,000 students protested outside parliament against the bill. Yet Pierrakakis, who served as minister of digital governance before taking up his current role last year, says the new law is “fully commensurate with the Constitution” because it “does not touch upon the foundation of new entities but actually allows for the location of chapters of existing universities within Greece”. The prohibition of private universities “had a symbolic nature” in Greece, says Pierrakakis. “I think it’s important for governments and politicians to show that certain totemic policies which have remained in our country for decades, if they’re considered to be non-productive, we should have the courage to break them or change them,” he says. Greece has a vast academic diaspora, with more than 40,000 students currently enrolled overseas. The new law, says Pierrakakis, would help to “render the country an educational centre” and “address the number of Greeks who are leaving the country to study abroad because they cannot have their educational destinies fulfilled domestically”. While the facilitation of private universities has attracted most headlines, the minister says, “85 percent of the content of the law touches upon institutional changes in public universities”. Alongside “breaking the state monopoly on higher education”, he says, the law has two other central goals: to allow for the establishment of joint Masters programmes between Greek public universities and “internationally renowned” overseas universities, and to grant international students “easier access to the Greek higher education system for brief periods of study”. Also read: Greece: Students block streets in protest of potential private universities

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China: Familiar phenomenon

The unemployment rate for youth aged 16-24 in cities reached a record high of 21.3 percent last June (2023). That was perhaps too embarrassing for the government, so it stopped publishing the data series while it rejigged its calculation to exclude young people seeking jobs while studying. The new numbers are lower, but still depressing: in March 15.3 percent of young people in cities were unemployed. That’s nearly three times the overall jobless rate. For young graduates, the situation is probably even more dire. China does not release unemployment data for this cohort. By our calculations (including students who are seeking jobs), the unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds with university education was 25.2 percent in 2020, the last year for which census data are available. That was 1.8 times the unemployment rate of all young people at the time. China’s sluggish economy is at least partly to blame. Demand for graduates has stagnated. Meanwhile, the supply of them is growing. This year, nearly 12 million students are expected to graduate from higher-education institutions, an increase of 2 percent compared with last year. Between 2000 and 2024, the number of Chinese graduates per year grew more than tenfold. This phenomenon can be traced back to Min Tang, a Chinese economist who proposed expanding enrolment in higher education as a way of dealing with the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Such a policy would postpone young people’s entry into the job market and stimulate the economy by way of education spending, he said. The government adopted his plan, which coincided with societal changes that pushed in the same direction. Children born under China’s one-child policy began to come of age in 1999. With family size limited, parents had more to invest in each child-and more incentive to encourage their studies, since these children are expected to provide for their parents in old age. The rising number of graduates might not be such a problem if they were learning skills valued by employers. But Chinese companies complain that they cannot find qualified candidates for open positions. Part of the problem are low-quality minban daxue (private universities). Yet the skills mismatch extends across higher education. For example, the number of students studying the humanities is growing even though demand for such graduates is much lower than that for specialists in other fields. In his state-of-the-nation speech in March, Li Qiang, the prime minister, at least paid lip service to the idea of making sure more graduates learn skills needed in sectors such as advanced manufacturing and elderly care. But many will continue to find that their degree is not a ticket to a good job. Told for years that higher education is a ladder to a better life, their frustrations are growing. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist)

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Colleges are not battlegrounds

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA Students in elite institutions are highly privileged. Why do they not spend this precious time, while they are young and full of energy, learning about the world instead of fomenting riots to change it? Many of the most prestigious American universities have become dysfunctional during the past month. They have been unable to control violence on their campuses. Several haven’t held in-person classes for fear that some students will be threatened or harmed by others. The immediate cause of these eruptions is the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. As I write this, the situation is going out of control. A Jewish student has been stabbed in the eye at Yale. Protesters encampments have been set up in Columbia and several other elite universities. In some cases, they are set up along the path that visiting admission candidates take through the campus, and they feature anti-Semitic posters. Groups of students have locked arms across one of the main pathways into campuses holding signs that Jews may not enter. Institutions of higher learning, supposed to be havens of reason and calm, have been taken over by riot and disorder The immediate solution is clear: students who obstruct academic work of a college/university should be arrested forthwith. Universities have a right to do their work and those who seek to stop them violate that right. At the University of Texas, protesters who disrupted the campus were quickly hauled up by the police. This should be done in all cases. The causes underlying these protests are deep and grave. Students in elite institutions are highly privileged people. They live in comfort and have tremendous opportunities to learn. Why do they not spend this precious time, while they are young and full of energy, learning about the world instead of fomenting riots to change it? To condemn Israel, or Hamas, requires one to be aware of facts and principles that universities exist to teach. What is the history of the modern Middle East? How did Israel come into being? How Gaza? How is Israel governed? How is Gaza? What are the stated aims of Hamas? Of Israel? What are human rights? Wonderful things have been written over ages about all these subjects, and an institution of higher learning is the very place to explore these issues. One fact among many that will emerge from any serious study of the history of the modern Middle East is that most of its countries emerged after World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. During that war, Britain and France made commitments to Arabs and Jews that if they joined the fight against Germany and Turkey, they would be given homelands in the Middle East. Thus Israel and Iraq, for example, were born following these promises. Knowledge of these facts might give violent protesters pause, and that is just one of the many facts the protesters need to know. These are serious questions and addressing them will lead one to…

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South Africa: Shame & scandals

Ahead of the start of the academic year in February, South African higher education is mired in crisis, amid claims of corruption and questions over the ability of the country’s student funding scheme to manage payments. Higher education minister Blade Nzimande has been on the ropes for weeks following publication of allegations that together with NSFAS chair Ernest Khosa he took kickbacks from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), a bursary for students from poor and working-class families. The accusations are levelled by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), a civil society body, which shared as evidence what it says are voice recordings of Khosa and representatives of NSFAS service providers. The alleged payments reportedly include a donation of one million rand (Rs.44 lakh) to the South African Communist Party, which Nzimande chairs, from the husband of a company director. These allegations add to a sense of turmoil at the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), which oversees NSFAS and has lost a string of key senior staff members in recent months. Politicians, students and civil society groups have called for Nzimande to be sacked. As the new academic year looms, meanwhile, NSFAS has missed a deadline that it set itself to pay outstanding allowances from last year to what it said was around 20,000 students. Only about 9,000 have been “successfully resolved” so far, according to the fund. It blames the continuing delays on universities failing to submit registrations on time, but the South African Union of Students (SAUS) laments what it says is NSFAS’ “regrettable and perpetual inability” to deliver on its mandate. SAUS says the 20,000 figure is probably a significant underestimate, because other students have been unable to get on to a new payment platform to receive their allowances. NSFAS had already been rocked last October by allegations of “irregular conduct” by its then chief executive, Andile Nongogo, in relation to the appointment of service providers, which pay around 1.1 million students their 1,650 rand (Rs.7,255) monthly allowance directly, in contrast to previous arrangements when universities made the payments. Nongogo was dismissed and his appeal against his termination was dismissed by a labour court in January. Nico Cloete, former director of the Centre for Higher Education Trust and coordinator of the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa, questions the wisdom of the 1999 decision to take responsibility for making bursary payments away from universities. “The administration of giving the funds to students was taken away from universities because in that system, people at NSFAS and other national agencies could not steal the money. So this is a perfect storm of a lack of capacity combined with corruption,” he says. Referring to the broader challenges facing the sector, Prof. Cloete adds: “This is of course the simple story of the new South Africa; a decrease in efficiency and an increase in corruption — a very sad (outcome) for higher education.” (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist)

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China: CCP takes charge

China’s move to take more direct control of university governance is likely to presage a further crackdown on academic freedom, experts warn. University presidents have long complained of a lack of autonomy stemming from the influence of government-appointed party secretaries on campuses, but these parallel governance structures are now being merged in institutions across the country. Tsinghua University issued a notice in February announcing the merger of its party committee and the office of the president to form a new Party Committee Office that will run the country’s top-ranked institution, Radio Free Asia reported. And a review of campus websites by the US-funded station indicates that similar changes are under way in at least eight other major institutions. This signifies a profound shift in power dynamics, placing greater emphasis on the authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in higher education, according to Ye Liu, a reader in international development at King’s College London. “While not entirely unexpected, this development underscores the enduring influence of the CCP administration over academic affairs,” she says. Dr. Liu says that while party committees have long exercised control over university operations by promoting ideological reforms, academics had been able to retain a degree of freedom in their teaching and research provided that they declared their loyalty to the CCP. The merger of the parallel systems could presage a “heightened crackdown on academic freedom,” says Dr. Liu. Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s, views the mergers as underlining that the CCP regards universities as key areas for indoctrination and for managing potential ideological threats, although, he explains, it had always been known that real power on campuses lay in the hands of party officials. “The changes that have been implemented, therefore, while making this role far clearer, don’t probably mean any radical change from the way things have been before. They just make it more explicit. They underline just how deep the party now reaches into society, and how commanding its role is,” says Brown.

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Palestine: Educide charge

Israel has been accused of deliberately targeting universities and academics in Gaza as part of a strategy branded “educide”. Following the controlled demolition of Al-Israa University, Israeli army footage of which was widely shared on social media, every single higher education institution in Gaza is believed to have either been destroyed or severely damaged since the invasion began. Samia Al-Botmeh, assistant professor of economics at Birzeit University in the West Bank, told Times Higher Education that the elaborate effort required to destroy large public buildings such as Al-Israa meant that it could only be part of an intentional plan to make Gaza “uninhabitable”. “The destruction of the education sector is part of this overarching strategy of the destruction of every aspect of services in Gaza that make life there possible,” she says. Recent figures from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor indicate that Israeli military action has killed at least 94 university professors in Gaza since the country began its retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attacks, as well as hundreds of lecturers and thousands of students. The organisation claimed that Israel had “targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice”. Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University, London, says “academia has been destroyed” in Gaza as part of an “educide”. “The damage of three months will take 10-20 years to recover from,” says Prof. Gordon, vice-president of the British Society for Middle East Studies. Israel has defended the bombing of some universities by claiming that they were being used as training camps for Hamas, but Dr. Al-Botmeh says education is being targeted because it is a “survival mechanism” for Palestinians. “We see it as a mechanism of resistance, and, of course, Israel understands that, so is trying to undermine our capacity to survive, to resist, and our capacity to continue as a people,” she says. Elham Kateeb, dean of scientific research at Al-Quds University, says all Palestinian universities in the West Bank are delivering education through distance learning and have tailored in-person teaching to address safety concerns on the roads and challenges at checkpoints. “Despite the setbacks, universities can play a pivotal role in leading Palestinians towards their goals and state-building. This commitment is embedded in their core missions of education, research and community service,” says Kateeb.

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BRAZIL: Return to normalcy

High-profile “exiled” academics have returned to Brazil after a “change in atmosphere” in the year since Jair Bolsonaro lost the presidency. But the polarised country could now face strikes as higher education continues to suffer from years of underfunding. Hampered by a hostile legislature and spending restrictions, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — known as Lula — has struggled to implement many concrete reforms since returning to the presidency in January 2023, but researchers say his pro-education stance and commitment to science has left them feeling more secure than under his predecessor. “For science, technology and education, there is a period of calm that we did not see during the last government,” says Marcelo Knobel, professor of physics and former rector of the University of Campinas (Unicamp). “The people who are in charge of the main agencies, the ministers, they are serious people who believe in science and higher education. At the same time, not many changes can be made. It is very hard to negotiate in the legislative houses, there is a lack of money, and it is very difficult to introduce new discussions and ideas in this climate of constant polarisation,” says Knobel. Many universities were unable to pay for basic necessities due to budget cuts during Bolsonaro’s term and university lecturers and professors have seen their pay frozen since 2016. In his first year, Lula handed academics a 9 percent wage increase and upped the funding for Masters and Ph D scholarships in an attempt to stem the declining number of postgraduate students. Hiring freezes imposed on universities were also lifted and some saw their budgets begin to recover. But Lula’s government has signalled that no further pay rises will come this year, instead proposing a 9 percent increase over the next two years as well as increasing other allowances. Lola Aronovich, a literature professor at the Federal University of Ceara, says that while academics welcome movement after the long freeze, it was “not enough to cover what we lost” and cautions that there could be strikes this year as a result. Jean Wyllys, an academic and former congressman, whose decision to leave Brazil in 2019 was hailed as a “great day” by Bolsonaro himself, has returned to the country, as has Marcia Tiburi, a philosophy professor who fled to Paris after receiving online death threats from right-wing groups. Dawisson Lopes, a professor of international and comparative politics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who spent part of the Bolsonaro years in the UK, says many academics had felt the need to leave Brazil because of the “critically inhospitable conditions for research” and politicisation of teaching. “I returned because the political atmosphere was changing in the country, so it was safe for me and my family to come back to Brazil. When I say safe, I do mean physical safety,” he says. Bolsonaro has been barred from standing in 2026, but the ideology he inspired will continue to be a force in the country, with some…

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Thinking of studying abroad? Think Australia

Australia: Scholarships boom

Coronavirus has taken the sheen from Australian universities’ golden goose, with discounting, offshoring and other factors slashing the per-student value of international education at many institutions. A Times Higher Education analysis shows that while overseas enrolments took a battering from Covid-19, so did, tuition fees. Compared with 2019, per-student earnings for almost half the sector are down at least 10 percent — and sometimes much more — in 2022, the most recent year for which enrolment and revenue figures are available. Lower-ranked universities with substantial overseas enrolments have fared worst, relinquishing about 15-30 percent of their per-student income. They now face a big task rebuilding per-student returns as well as student numbers. International student fees are vitally important to these often cash-strapped institutions, providing on average 27 percent of their operating revenue in 2019, but that fell to 20 percent in 2022. Another 11 universities saw their per-student income fall by up to 10 percent. International education analyst Keri Ramirez says almost all Australian universities have offered scholarships to new overseas recruits in 2022, typically reducing tuition costs by 15-20 percent. Ramirez says average international fees have risen by just 1.5 percent in 2022, compared with 5 percent before the pandemic. Meanwhile, lockdowns and other “severe challenges” forced some offshore students to drop subjects, “which ultimately also reduced international revenue.” Many universities also charged less to students left stranded in their home countries. The University of Queensland, for example, says it has offered a “rebate” to its offshore students during the pandemic “as they were unable to access the benefits of an on-campus student experience”. Murdoch University has been offering a 20 percent “welcome back” scholarship to many international students, according to vice chancellor Andrew Deeks, who says Murdoch is now reviewing this approach. He says international recruitment had hit record levels in 2023 “and that trend is continuing this year.” Also read: Australia: China syndrome

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United States: Charters slowdown

A year ago, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter schools to open in New York City, where they already attract about 15 percent of public school students and even as thousands of families languish on waiting lists. But the governor’s plan drew fervent protests from fellow Democrats, including state legislators aligned with teachers’ unions. After a bruising fight, the governor had to settle last autumn for a small increase. The relative neglect of charters comes just as fresh evidence has arisen that they are successful. Last June, a comprehensive new study emerged from Stanford University. It is the latest of three national studies carried out over two decades by the Centre for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). The centre’s June’s study, which used data from 2014-2019 show a positive trajectory over time. In all, 31 geographic locations studied (29 states, New York City and the District of Columbia), pupils in charters outperformed their traditional public school peers. Pupils gained the equivalent of six days of learning in maths and 16 days in reading each year. “We don’t see a revolution,” says Macke Raymond, the lead researcher of the Stanford studies. “We are seeing thousands of (charter) schools getting a little bit better every year.” Other recent studies such as research by Douglas Harris at Tulane University and investigators at the University of Arkansas also report positive results. The latest CREDO report provides clear evidence of success and also describes which types of charter schools seem to be working best. Larger charter management organisations which run multiple schools at a time, have better results than stand-alone charters. There were also hundreds of successful charters where disadvantaged pupils (black, Hispanic, poor pupils or English-learners) performed similarly to or better than their more advantaged peers. Charter enrolment is growing and the schools’ impact on American children is substantial. In 2021, about 4 million public school pupils studied in charters, more than double the number enrolled back in 2010. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia allow them. In Chicago, where 15 percent of public school students enroll, black and Hispanic families are disproportionately represented, as is typical in cities that offer them. In poverty-stricken Philadelphia, a third of public school children are educated in charters. Vouchers offer political benefits because they are attractive to religious, home-schooling and suburban voters. Amid great fanfare, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida and other Republican-led states have passed laws allowing parents to use vouchers to direct public dollars to private schools they choose, including religious ones. “Republicans have long been supportive of charter schools even though most of their constituents do not attend,” says Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a think-tank. However, school-choice plans “can result in money actually in the pockets of Republican constituents… and…

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: How schools build good character

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA Hillsdale College, where I am employed, sponsors over 100 schools across the United States. These are ‘classical’ schools — they look back to a ‘classic’ age for direction and inspiration. One feature of classical schools is they aim to build ‘character’. It is a big word. It emanates from an ancient Greek word that means “to etch or engrave”. Developing character therefore requires repeated action. Aristotle wrote one of the first books to address the subject of ‘ethics’, another big word. In some ways, it is a synonym of character. Ethics are an attribute of human beings committed to good action and good thinking in their ‘character’. One develops character through the process of etching or engraving. She must work on it, especially when young. There are pitfalls on every side. A child may become lazy, unable to work intentionally, or hyperactive, unable to stop and think. A student may become a bully, dominating others, or reticent, unwilling to stand up for himself or contribute to discussion. Aristotle teaches us that against these vices, the place to be is in the middle. One should be active to the right degree, ambitious to the right degree, and ready to help others to the right degree. The process of growing up to build character is learning to navigate between extremes. Choice is the process of deliberation we undertake to choose between options. It is at the moment of choosing that one makes a little etch or engraving on the soul. Hard choices are those in which good must be given up for the sake of better, or some difficulty or pain suffered to avoid worse. One may want to run away when confronted with danger. Sometimes flight is right. People with good character have courage, and they run away only when it is right. The voice that advises courage is innate in human beings. We are made to listen to this voice. Our choices are our own, made internally in an interplay between our desires and thinking. We teachers help students best by the combination of what is famously called “precept and example”. Precept requires explaining concepts like the ones cited to a young person. Only human beings can understand these things, and all of them can. When a young person hears them, he understands goal-setting. Once he understands, he becomes an active agent in pursuit of the goal. Examples include a teacher behaving well, providing model good behaviour. It also includes correction of a student when he errs and praise when he does well. More powerfully, examples include the study of people in history and in literature who exhibit good character. Good schools help students to build good character through precept and example. Both are vital. This requires schools to be stable in direction, truthful in instruction, and inspirational in message. Students of good schools respond naturally and with enthusiasm. Also read: Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2023-24: Dr. Larry Arnn

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LETTER FROM AMERICA: Promising revelation

Dr Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, USA As I wrote in my last despatch, at Hillsdale College, we are working to become involved with education in India. We are excited by this prospect because we love to teach, because India is important, and because there are profound commonalities between our countries. As I wrote last time, India and the United States have a kinship in at least two important respects: our practice of representative government, and the common roots of our languages. The importance of this second factor cannot be overestimated. Human capability to speak is the outcome of human reasoning capability, the unique capacity distinguishing us from all other earthly creatures. The western classics teach us that this gift is synonymous with speech. If you reflect for a minute, you will discern that you are thinking in words. And if you can think in words, you can utter and therefore share them. This draws us closer together than any other species. This is why education is important to humanity. We can do so much more with our minds than other creatures. It is true that we have bodies, like all animals, and it is true that these bodies have needs. We must feed them, rest them, grow them. We must reproduce them, which means we must care for the young. All of this is common across the animal kingdom. What is different is that homo sapiens have choices about how we do these things. This gives us a larger responsibility than other creatures. Our gift of reason is constantly interacting with our physical needs. This makes education of young humans much more important than other creatures. It takes much longer. It achieves much more. What then is education? The term comes from a Latin word meaning “to lead forth”. This raises the question, which way is forth? Aristotle writes that if one can identify a good horse, one ought to be able to tell who is a good human being. Horses are strong and fast. Racehorses in particular are beautiful when they perform. They are made to run. What are we made to do? We all have examples of excellent human beings whom we look up to. We admire people for their physical traits. When they are strong, fast, or physically beautiful, they are attractive to us. They represent a kind of perfection to which we all aspire. But in humans, physical traits never operate separately from our moral and mental traits. We can ruin our bodies by bad habits. We can build them by good habits, and we can choose what type of habits we will develop. The way “forth” for human beings is to grow towards excellence in body and soul. Good education cultivates this excellence through development of character and intellect. In the next letter, I will discuss how good schools develop character. In the following one, I will dwell on how they develop the intellect. These methods are the same in America and India, and…

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Canada: Medium of instruction tax

McGill University, one of Canada’s top-ranked higher education institutions, is warning that a provincial policy to discourage English-language instruction through sharp tuition fee hikes is threatening its existence. The move by Quebec premier François Legault “puts the university’s very future in question”, McGill said in issuing an estimate that the plan could cost the institution close to C$100 million (Rs.620 crore) a year and cause it grave reputational damage. Legault is a founder of the conservative-nationalist Coalition Avenir Quebec party, which has put a priority on reviving the use of the French language in his province, the nation’s largest by area and second-biggest by population. In recent weeks and months, Legault’s government — first elected in 2018 — has pushed a plan that imposes his French-language agenda on higher education through steps that include substantial tuition increases for Canadian students from outside Quebec and new French-proficiency graduation requirements for most of them. That planned tuition increase for non-Quebec Canadians — to C$12,000 (Rs.7.44 lakh) per year, or 33 percent beyond current levels — is down from the Legault government’s initial suggestion in October for a rate of C$17,000. Yet it still would make McGill far more expensive for such students than top-tier competitors such as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. The Legault plan, due to take effect this coming autumn, would also require that English-language institutions in Quebec give an overwhelming share of the fees they receive from international students — already running at about C$20,000 per year — to French-language universities. McGill estimates that the plan would cost it an annual budgetary loss of C$42-C$94 million (Rs.260-582 crore). Concordia University estimates a C$15.5 million initial-year loss. The government’s goal for the use of the French language “is academically and technically unfeasible and will deter students from coming here,” McGill’s president, Deep Saini, said in issuing his institution’s cost estimate. The president of Concordia, Graham Carr, said that the mere threat of the policy is already costing Quebec higher education harm to its global reputation that “cannot be undone”. Quebec’s French-speaking institutions have showed limited sympathy. The University of Quebec said the Legault government is taking steps aimed at “ensuring a better balance of income generated by international students between universities”. And leaders of several other French-speaking institutions — including the University of Montreal and Laval University — say they don’t necessarily oppose the idea of taking resources from their more popular English-language counterparts, as long as the plan isn’t so extreme that it causes them great harm. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)

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South Korea: Internationalisation Drive

Foreigners are among the more than 4,000 who make up Yonsei University’s 39,000-strong student body, their presence attesting to the fact that Yonsei’s name, hallowed in Korea, carries weight far outside the country, too. Known as one of the troika of the nation’s top “SKY universities” (alongside Seoul National and Korea universities), Yonsei is both highly funded and heavily oversubscribed — an administrator’s dream come true. But elsewhere in Korean higher education, things are not so peachy. Last spring, news headlines warned of “zombie universities”, near-empty campuses that continue to operate despite inevitability of ultimate closure. Official figures don’t offer much cheer either, with Korea’s Ministry of Education identifying 84 financially insolvent institutions that need to shut down. And there are even greater challenges in the pipeline. By 2040, the number of Korean students eligible to enter university will drop to 280,000 — 39 percent down from 460,000 in 2020, according to the Korean Council for University Education (KCUE), the representative association of four-year universities. Like neighbouring Japan, Korea suffers from a low birth rate and ageing population. But here, the demographic cliff is much steeper. Indeed, demographic decline has already put scores of universities out of business and there are calls for the government to help others shut down gracefully, perhaps by buying their land so that they can afford to offer severance pay to faculty and staff. If they are to avoid that fate, many others will have to grapple with a rapidly shifting enrolment landscape, on top of adapting to highly disruptive new technologies and the 180-degree policy pivots typical of the country’s change-loving political leaders. With nearly 74 percent of Koreans enrolling in higher education, it’s unlikely that more domestic learners can be lured into the sector. The focus, then, must be on admitting more foreigners, academics and policymakers broadly agree. But while this seems an obvious — if not a complete — remedy, the path to internationalisation is far from straightforward. Last summer, the government published a plan to recruit thousands more international students by 2027. The Study Korea 300,000 initiative plans to make Korean universities more globally competitive and to increase overseas enrolment by more than a third, from the current estimated 180,000. But some scholars feel this is an arbitrary and unrealistic goal. Jun Hyun Hong, a professor in the School of Public Service at Seoul’s Chung-Ang University (CAU) and adviser to the government on the initiative, believes the aspiration is “unsustainable” because it puts production-like emphasis on output without fully understanding the complex human interactions behind them. “I always say that education now is considered part of industry,” he previously told Times Higher Education. “This is an industrial view; this is not an education view.” Hong is worried that without ensuring quality of education, a push to significantly increase the number of international students in Korea could ultimately backfire. Others argue that without institutional targets, it will be very hard to get all universities on board. But even critics of the scheme,…

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China: Accommodation Squeeze

Rapid expansion of postgraduate enrolment is forcing Chinese universities to abandon their “boarding school” model of providing on-campus accommodation for all students. Institutions have long provided subsidised dormitories, which cost significantly less than private off-campus options. At Fudan University, for example, on-campus accommodation costs Master’s students between 800 yuan (Rs.9,600) and 1,600 yuan annually, while a single room off campus could cost more than 4,000 yuan. But the topic has become the subject of significant debate after institutions including Peking University announced that students on professional postgraduate degrees — programmes focused on particular professions, such as MBAs and Master’s in engineering, medicine and public administration — would not be eligible for on-campus accommodation. At least ten other universities have stated that students on professional postgraduate degrees will have nil or limited access to on-campus accommodation, including Fudan and Beijing Normal, Nanjing, Nankai and Xiamen universities. “It will become normal that higher education institutions will no longer provide graduate student dormitories,” writes Bao Wanqing, a research fellow at Qinghai Normal University in an opinion article. According to an annual report on postgraduate enrolment, the number of Chinese students on professional postgraduate degrees more than tripled from 197,000 in 2012 to 649,000 in 2021, representing nearly 62 percent of all Master’s admissions. China’s Ministry of Education has set a target of increasing that proportion to two-thirds by the end of 2025. “I do know that many universities’ professional Master’s students have exceeded the number of academic Master’s students, with the former often being full-time employees,” says Yingyi Ma, director of Asian studies at Syracuse University. “Universities prefer these kinds of professional programmes — they are cash cows.” The number of students taking any type of postgraduate degree in China has exploded in recent years in the face of a challenging job market. The number writing the national postgraduate entrance exam hit 4.74 million in 2023, up from 2.4 million just five years earlier. “The graduate boom is another manifestation of degree inflation in Chinese higher education. Many students could not find jobs or good jobs, so they try to get into postgraduate programmes,” says Prof. Ma.

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France: Discriminatory legislation

France’s newly passed hard-line immigration law will repel international students and stifle French research, warn education leaders. The controversial new legislation approved by the French parliament in December, divided President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, while the far-right, anti-immigration politician Marine Le Pen, leader of National Rally, heralded it as an “ideological victory”. The Bill includes migration quotas, restrictions on citizenship for those born in France to non-citizens, cuts to migrants’ benefits eligibility and the potential to remove dual nationals convicted of certain crimes from French citizenship. Despite France’s goal of attracting 500,000 international students by 2027, the new law contains several measures that many fear will dissuade them. To obtain a residence permit, students from overseas will have to pay an as-yet undetermined “return deposit” to cover potential “removal costs”. The deposit would be returned when they leave France upon their permit’s expiration or when they obtain a new visa. International students will also have to demonstrate the “real and serious nature of their studies” on a yearly basis, Le Monde reported, or risk having their residence permit withdrawn. The legislation also makes higher university registration fees for non-European Union students’ compulsory, after their introduction in 2019 on a voluntary basis decided by universities. While French students and those from within the EU pay €170 (Rs.15,470) to register for a bachelor’s degree and €243 for a Master’s, non-EU students will now be obliged to pay €2,770 (Rs.2.52 lakh) and €3,770 respectively. A joint statement released by France Universites, the Conference of Deans of French Schools of Engineering (CDEFI) and several student unions called on Macron to challenge the law. Alexis Michel, director of the Brest National School of Engineering and president of CDEFI’s Europe and International Commission, called the return deposit a “mark of suspicion” that reflected “a desire to select students through money” rather than merit. “The idea that candidates for migration present themselves as students to circumvent the procedures is a statistical fiction. CDEFI requests the removal of the return deposit and waits for the president of the republic to exercise his constitutional prerogatives to provoke a new deliberation of the bill in parliament,” says Prof. Michel. Both Macron and prime minister Elisabeth Borne have already partially walked back the return deposit measure during media appearances, according to Le Monde, with the former saying it was “not a good idea” and the latter commenting, “Is this the best system? Not necessarily.” Sylvie Retailleau, the minister of higher education and research, submitted her resignation over the bill, which Macron rejected. France Universites later said the minister had received “strong commitments” from the president and prime minister, pledging to overturn “discriminatory and ineffective measures” including the deposit.

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United States: Academic Crucifixion

By surrendering to a political mob despite the apparent protection of the world’s most powerful university, Claudine Gay has set a precedent that has left academics wondering who can possibly survive the rising ideological crusades of America. On January 2, Prof. Gay stepped down as president of Harvard University after six months of stifling pressure from an alignment of conservative forces, navigating the howls of pro-Israel activists, only to succumb to borderline complaints about poor editing in her past scholarly writings. It amounts to a politically based toppling of the leader of the nation’s most prestigious and well-endowed university, say several academics, with ominous implications for anyone else in academia who dares to persistently challenge the interests of US political and economic wealth. The ultimate success of the plagiarism complaints as the apparently determinative weapon against Prof. Gay, academics warn, is especially worrying, since it is an allegation that is becoming very easy to raise with the help of advanced computer tools and often very difficult to adjudicate in a fair and consistent manner. “Very few of us can probably withstand that kind of scrutiny,” says Jennifer Ruth, professor of film studies at Portland State University who writes on issues of academic freedom through the American Association of University Professors. “By giving in, Harvard has set the stage for continuing the expansion of this kind of scare and chilling of academic freedom and targeting of higher ed.” The endgame for Prof. Gay began last December, when she and the heads of two other elite US universities — all women relatively new to their presidencies — agreed to appear before Congress to answer Republican allegations that student protests against Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians amounted to campus tolerance of anti-semitism. That moment of political theatre — combined with sustained criticism from wealthy individual donors — soon led one of the presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, to step down. Prof. Gay appeared to have survived the moment, backed by hundreds of faculty demanding that she stay. But she then became consumed by a parallel campaign by conservative activists compiling a list of more than 40 instances — typically brief excerpts of a few sentences or less — that they put forth as evidence that her scholarly record was marred by repeatedly citing others without proper credit. Prof. Gay — the first black president of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university — said she had resigned “in the best interests of Harvard” to let the institution move forward. In a subsequent article for The New York Times, she described a brief presidency filled with constant attacks including death threats, and urged academic colleagues nationwide not to succumb to “the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture”. She acknowledged that her critics were able to find “instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language without proper attribution”, but said she immediately corrected such “errors”, and “never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever…

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Germany: Leaky pipeline

Insufficient German language skills are the primary hurdle for international academics targeting long-term careers in Germany, a new study has found. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) interviewed international postdocs, new professors and members of university management for the study, concluding that while research funding opportunities and early career promotions attract academics to Germany, international researchers have less confidence in their long-term career prospects. Study respondents also cited the complexity of career paths in Germany, experiences of xenophobia and exclusion and issues with the visa system as obstacles dissuading them from pursuing professorships in the country. Jan Kercher, a senior researcher at DAAD, noted that while international researchers comprise almost 14 percent of academic staff in Germany, they make up about 7 percent of professors. “There is a kind of ‘leaky pipeline’ on the path of international researchers from doctorate to professorship in Germany,” he told Times Higher Education. Of the academics surveyed, almost 70 percent said German language skills were relevant or highly relevant for their careers. Lack of fluency inhibited their daily collaboration with colleagues, their inclusion in faculty meetings and their teaching capacity, they said. Several respondents shared experiences of xenophobia and racism in Germany, with one describing a sense of “hostility” from the general public and another citing a “closed” German culture. Others discussed expensive, competitive housing markets. German visa laws, which link residence permits to employment, concerned study participants from outside the European Union. “In addition, the international academics and researchers surveyed reported a lack of multilingualism and service orientation in the immigration authorities,” says Dr. Kercher. DAAD president Joybrato Mukherjee stresses the importance of plugging the “leaky pipeline”. “Germany is a highly attractive host country for international academics and researchers,” says Prof. Mukherjee, president of the University of Giessen. “On this basis, we should be even more successful in the future in supporting international talent on their path to a professorship.” (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times Higher Education)

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United States: Debate restoration initiatives

Facing their toughest-ever nationwide tests of academic freedom, some US institutions are slowly trying to move past questions of intrusive donors and violent protests by teaching more directly about tolerance. While many of the nation’s campuses remain convulsed by demonstrations, threats, and arrests relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict, several of them — including Harvard University, Dartmouth College, New York University and the University of Virginia — have stepped forward with educational programmes aimed at students, faculty and staff. Virginia plans a series of public presentations by experts on Middle East politics and global conflicts. Its aim is to “encourage the free sharing of beliefs and ideas, regardless of political leaning”, says provost Ian Baucom. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, promises education and training programmes aimed at “protecting all members of our community”, although she puts particular emphasis on confronting “antisemitism in daily life”. NYU is creating a Center for the Study of Antisemitism, while Dartmouth started educational forums on the conflict almost immediately after the initial Hamas attack. Signs of US higher education remembering and prioritising its teaching role in the face of flaring Israeli-Palestinian violence remain too rare, says Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, a writers’ group that has become a leading voice for campus free speech protections. “That has to be a much more deliberate, intentional part of the university experience, because we’re seeing that it’s really not working as is,” says Nossel. The Biden administration also tried to calm the situation by formally warning college and university leaders nationwide that they have a legal obligation to provide all students with an educational environment free from discrimination.

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Australia: China syndrome

The first international student from China, enrolled at the University of Sydney a century ago. Now its sandstone buildings hum with foreign languages: almost half the university’s students are from overseas. “For Asian kids, we value the rankings a lot,” says one of its Chinese students, who asks not to be named. Australian universities perform well in them; the University of Sydney is one of nine ranked among the world’s Top 100 institutions. Australia also has better weather than Britain or Canada, and less gun crime than America. When the student enrolled in 2015, it “seemed like one of the friendliest countries in the Western world”. Over the past two decades, the number of international students in Australia has risen nearly fourfold, to 440,000 in 2019. Its universities now attract more foreign talent than those of any country except America and Britain. Education is Australia’s fourth-biggest export, worth around 3 percent of GDP. This has made its universities dependent on the higher fees foreigners pay — a worry when Australia closed its borders in 2020 and again later that year when a trade war erupted with China, which supplies about a third of incomers. Yet most of the universities have managed these shocks fairly easily. And in 2023, foreign students have returned in droves, with 425,000 now in Australia. Universities were largely unaffected by the trade spat. While slapping curbs on Australia’s exports from wine to coal, China didn’t deter its citizens from attending the country’s universities. When the pandemic struck, Chinese students were also more willing than others to stick with online learning, notes Peter Varghese, chancellor of the University of Queensland. Public investment in Australian tertiary education is among the lowest in the OECD. This makes the universities especially reliant on the revenue foreign students provide, including A$41 billion (Rs.2.28 lakh crore) in fees and other spending in the year to September. There is also value in “the enduring diplomatic benefit of building constructive relationships” with some of the world’s brightest citizens, notes Mark Scott, vice chancellor, University of Sydney, But there is a downside. Some universities have been accused of suppressing criticism of China. Chinese student spies are alleged to be snooping on campuses and intimidating classmates. In 2019, scuffles broke out in several universities between Chinese nationalists and pro-democracy campaigners. Universities have been subject to a “sustained campaign of intimidation, harassment, censorship and intelligence gathering”, thundered a conservative senator, James Paterson, last year. Partly as a result, universities are becoming just a bit less dependent on China. Scandals over foreign interference were a big wake-up call, says Rory Medcalf of the Australian National University. Vice chancellors are now wooing new markets. Sydney University is taking record numbers from Malaysia and Vietnam. Since 2018, the number of Indians studying down under has risen by a third. Chinese students now represent 33 percent of the foreign cohort, down from a peak of 38 percent. Continued geopolitical tensions are meanwhile leading to more scrutiny of university research and partnerships.…

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